Tony Curtis Perry

As a scholar of race, culture, and the environment, Tony Perry’s research focuses on the environmental history of slavery in the U.S. In this work Perry examines how the institution of slavery informed enslaved people’s relationship to the environment, how this relationship diverged from that of slaveholders, and how differences in the enslaved community contributed to differences in said relationship among slaves. He argues that across several dimensions of the environment – the land and landscape, the aquatic, the weather, and the supernatural – enslaved women and men relied heavily on the latter as the primary arena of power from which they drew, even as they frequently found the environment an antagonizing entity in their daily lives.

Perry received his Ph.D. in American Studies from the University of Maryland, College Park, an M.A. in American Studies from Purdue University, and a B.A. in English and Africana Studies from Bowdoin College.